The Karaoke dialog

To aid the creation of Karaoke movies the product contains a special dialog (or wizard) accessible through the edit menu which allows for the creation of pages of lyrics and their synching with music. This dialog means that someone without any knowledge of movie editing can create a karaoke movie complete with background graphics. The dialog is accessed via the option.

Preparing to sync between lyrics and music

The karaoke dialog requires two elements to be in place before syncing can be carried out. Once these two elements are in place the "Sync" button can be pressed and the syncing commence. The following actions will then take place: The karaoke syncing will continue until the either the MIDI file ends or beforehand if the "stop" button is pressed. At this point a number of options are presented:

Importing text lyrics from a file

The lyrics for the song are entered in two ways: Importing from a text file is a particularly convenient method of aquiring lyrics and is recommended as it's easier to work with lyrics in this form. It also means that lyrics can be found on the internet, cut and pasted into a text document, then imported through the karaoke dialog. An imported text file must follow the following rules: To illustrate this, the first two lines in the text file for the Robbie Williams song "Eternity" might be:
     Close your/ eyes so / you don't /hear them
     They don't /  need to/see you cry
Note that leading or trailing spaces and blank lines in the text file are ignored and a double '//' indicates a blank line should appear in the movie lyric page.

Automatically adding graphics frames to the karaoke

It is possible for the karaoke dialog to automatically add graphics that appear behind the song's lyrics. To do this the graphics should be set up as normal graphical layers in the movie via the normal editor but with names that indicate their purpose. The naming convention is as follows.

Setting the karaoke options

A number of options can be set within the karaoke dialog: When editing a previously created movie the settings for these options are read from the movie when the karaoke dialog starts.

Re-editing with the dialog

Once syncing has been done and the layers and events saved back to the movie and the normal edit mode, the dialog can be opened again to re-sync the lyrics. If this is done then no alteration should be made to layers with names that begin with "#" since this is where the dialog finds the lyrics. These layers are written over by the dialog when the new sync is saved back to the movie.

If the time of the resync-ed lyrics is less than the original movie duration the timelines are not truncated (this must be done in the editor if needed). However if the new syncing requires more time than the original movie all timelines will be automatically extended.

An important note on text size and positioning

It is advisable to keep text as close to the top left of the frame as possible as font sizes on mobile phones are unpredictable, can vary considerably and there is no guarantee how long or high each line of text will become in a phone. Therefore it is better to leave a margin of error for unforseen expansion when the phone displays the text. For the same reason it is best to not try to fit too much text on one movie line or movie page.

A common mistake when creating karaoke movies, is to assume that the text will occupy the same area on the phone's display as it does when viewing the movie through the product's preview facility. The wireless Java specification allows for a number of font types and these are approximated by the product's previewer. The exception is where karaoke movies are being generated for a given phone and there is confidence of a match between the product's font sizing and that of the phone's.